Wise Marketing Secrets Interview Series with Lars Bachmann
Lars has been working with marketing and SEO for over 10 years. The first couple of years in the advertising business, and later on, 7 years as an SEO consultant and entrepreneur.
Now Lars Bachmann works as Online marketing manager at Cykelpartner.dk which is Denmark’s largest webshop in the bike industry.
You can visit his blog in Danish at www.larsbachmann.dk
How would you explain specifically what you do as an SEO?
As an SEO I have focus on getting more valuable traffic to a website. I do that by getting higher rankings on keywords and phrases, that are relevant for the website.
What is your primary marketing goal when it comes to delivering results?
My primary goal is to make sure that my customer makes more money than I do. Customers often come to me and want to pay me for ranking higher on 3 specific keywords.
But when I ask them if they can make money on those keywords, they often don’t know. So my goal is to find hundreds of keywords that are valuable for the site, and create more traffic to the right pages on those keywords.
Which new skills are most important for SEO’s to learn in the next six months?
You still have to focus on good content, a fast website and good semantic HTML, and last but not least, you have to get those good links.
What do you find most rewarding about SEO?
The most rewarding thing is to find a set of keywords and phrases that my competitors haven’t thought about, and see how they are making money for my employer or customer.
How do you stay updated with the latest SEO industry news?
I’m from a small country called Denmark, and although we have several good blogs and pages about the subject, I often go to the American blogs and sites, because they are usually a few steps ahead.
As an SEO, what is your favorite SEO hack?
What’s better than a good link? That’s a link you “steal” from you competitor.
By using tools as Screaming Frog or Xenu I like to find broken links on pages and then reach out to the webmaster and notify them that they have a link that ends in a 404. And then I suggest a page on my own site they can link to instead.
Are there any particular SEO trends on the horizon that really excite you?
Not really.
What are some of the top tools and apps in your SEO stack?
I use Google.com of course and then I use tools as ahrefs.com, tinyrocketlab.com, Screaming Frog etc.
How is your typical work day structured?
I typically use the first hour to check my E-mails, and make a to-do plan. Then I follow up on ongoing projects, and make plans for new ones.
On a daily basis I always check our rankings, and see if there is anything to worry about.
Which one book/blog post would you recommend every SEO should read?
Uhh, that’s a difficult question. I took a quick look in my bookmarks, and found a link to Quicksprout.com.
All though it’s a few years old, it’s still a pretty good one. http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/12/04/11-seo-changes-that-will-give-you-big-results/
What advice would you share with other SEO’s who want to become more productive?
Use pen and paper to make a list of daily goals. For example: today I have to write an article about [keyword] on at least 1200 words, and get 3 new links to my website.
Among the Google algorithm updates what is the most challenging one that you’ve encountered?
I worked with a few sites that suffer from the Panda update. Thin pages and Duplicate content are a huge problem on many sites. It can take a long time to clean that up.
If there’s one SEO Guru you’d recommend who and why.
I won’t recommend one, because there are so many aspects of SEO. Some are specialized in technical SEO, some in copywriting, some in linkbuilding or content marketing etc.
If you are new to SEO, I will recommend to visit sites as moz.com and Quicksprout.com, and then read the articles and often you can find interesting people in the comment section.